


Two and Twenty-Eight

by SomewhereApart



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 06:24:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16948701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomewhereApart/pseuds/SomewhereApart
Summary: Love is beautiful…and sometimes petty.





	Two and Twenty-Eight

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Okay, I know you did the Outlaw Peanut with a dash of Regal Peanut(still in love with both peanut names btw) but you know I'd love to ask for more a Regal Peanut ficlet :) Please and thank you?

Love comes easily, just as she’d hoped. Ten perfect fingers, and ten perfect toes. Her daddy’s dimples in soft cheeks. Blue eyes (dark blue, thank God), and rosebud lips, and a tiny tongue she just can’t seem to keep in her mouth.

Robin’s daughter. Her daughter?

She’s a good baby, with the sweetest disposition. Rarely cries, sleeps well, takes a bottle like a champ. She hates diaper changes (hates disposable diapers entirely, flares up in a terrible diaper rash on day two – she does cry then, but who could blame her? – and they have to switch to cloth), but loves bath time. She’s a snuggler. She likes to be held. Regina keeps having to remind Robin it’s not safe to fall asleep with her in their bed.

She tells her every day how loved she is, how wonderful, vaccinates her against the sharp words of the world around her, and her own traitorous heart. Because love comes easily, but it’s not alone, and the other things she feels, they don’t go quietly into the night. Zelena was right, she _is_ envious, it burns through her, the jealousy, settles in deep and low and leaves her with phantom echoes of the poison that cauterized her womb and left it empty.

She loves this baby (ten perfect fingers, ten perfect toes, dimples, and new baby smell), but there are parts of her that ache for things she’ll never have in a way they never did before.

It had never bothered her. (That’s not true, it had, from time to time, when the loneliness was yawning and eternal, and the vengeance felt empty and unsustainable. She’d wanted, then, but she’d never regretted, not really, not truly. She’d always known that what she’d done was best.) She’d been born of a mother who doled out hurt and love in unequal measure, the first more than the second, and she herself had the touch of cruelty, and death, and manipulation. She had never thought she’d needed to carry a child to mother it, had thought perhaps it was best she didn’t. What if it was genetic, the cruelty? No, better to love someone else’s child - better to be a mother to a baby that wouldn’t look back at her with Mother’s smile, or Daddy’s kind eyes.

She’d taken Henry in and loved him with her whole heart, her whole being, had let him flood her world with light and love and splendor. She was a Mother-with-a-capital-M, but more importantly a mommy, and genetics be damned. DNA meant nothing. He was _her son_. And if she ever wanted another, she would find a baby in need of loving, and she would unearth some new wellspring of affection in her heart, and she would do it all over again.

It had never bothered her, until now. But this baby, this sweet girl, she is a Mills woman, they share DNA, she is a child of her own lineage, but not _hers,_ and how dare she? How dare Zelena pour salt into this particular wound? How on earth did she even know it existed?

She had never _needed_ Robin’s child until someone else had it - no, that’s not true, because he has another child and she loves him purely and without malice. She had never needed Robin’s child until _Zelena_ had it, and now she is envious to her very core.

Ten perfect fingers, ten perfect toes, and none of them from her. She cradles the tiny body against her thighs, her back against the headboard, feet planted on the bed, legs bouncing anxiously (she murmurs “Yankee Doodle Went to Town” under her breath like they are playing, like she had with Henry, like this is not her own dark war manifesting itself all over this beautiful child), and she burns. Tiny fingers (long fingers, someday she’ll teach her to play piano and maybe she’ll be more interested than Henry was) curl around her thumbs, and spit bubbles on that tongue as she sticks it out again.

And Regina smiles. She cannot help it. Love came quickly, and she loves so much. So, so much.

And every time she feels this way, every time she wakes in the night and murmurs that she will take her, and has to pad all the way down to the kitchen to heat a bottle instead of just tugging her shirt aside and offering a breast (she had never wanted that with Henry, had never _cared),_ she vows to love her even harder. She looks and she searches, and she finds something new to adore.

She counts days, and she cannot figure out why. Cannot admit to herself why. The baby is one day old. Three days old. Seventeen days old. She has loved her for forty-two days.

When she is two months and twenty-eight days old, when she has been loved for two months, and twenty-eight days, Regina wakes up with twin pangs of relief and shame. She knows now. She can admit it now.

Robin is snoring softly beside her, the dead sleep of a man who took the midnight feedings, and so Regina clicks off the baby monitor and moves quickly and quietly to the room just down the hall where their daughter fusses and cries and generally complains in the only way she knows how about her lack of breakfast.

“Alright, sweet pea,” Regina croons, as she opens then door, “Alright, my sweetheart. I’m here.” She scoops her up, all two-months-and-twenty-eight-days of her, all ten perfect fingers, ten perfect toes, dimples and chubby thighs and long fingers, ears like Regina and her mother before her, long feet, and legs that kick whenever they play Motown on the stereo.

She picks her up, and the crying ceases – she is an easy baby, and a loving one, she trusts, she knows, she’s being taken care of now, her discomfort is about to end, and so she looks at Regina and she smiles, and Regina smiles back.

She has loved this little girl for two months and twenty-eight days, and she may not be a villain anymore but she still carries darkness. She knows she does, because as she brings this little peanut to her shoulder, bounces and murmurs as she carries her out of the room and down to the kitchen for her first meal of the day, she thinks to herself that Zelena, well, Zelena had only carried her for two months and twenty- _seven_ days, and maybe it’s petty, but here we are.

There’s relief and there’s shame, but there’s no envy, not anymore. This baby who still cannot keep her tongue in her mouth, she grasps at Regina’s hair with tiny fists, and she burbles and presses inward, and she _trusts_ , and she _loves_ , and what else is there, really?

Love comes immediately, but envy only takes its leave after two months and twenty-eight days, when they go to the kitchen, Regina and her little girl, and they talk through their morning just like always, heating a bottle and starting the coffee brewing just like always, only the two of them this early in the day. Just like always.

It’s petty, this little prison she’s kept herself in, the bars made up of days Zelena had something that she could not, but this morning, as she pops a bottle between waiting lips and slow dances her daughter around the kitchen, singing softly (it’s “My Girl,” and the baby kicks her little legs despite Regina’s hold, smiling and dribbling milk out of the corner of her mouth and back to her neck), Regina remembers the lesson she’d learned all those years ago:

Blood doesn’t make a family, love does.

And love, well, love came immediately.


End file.
